After studying Applied Arts, Gilles Teboul began to develop his first explorations in painting and participated in collective exhibitions, while collaborating with luxury labels and advertising agencies. Since 2000, he has chosen painting and photography. He regularly presents his work in galleries and art centers.

Approach

In his latest series, Gilles Teboul continues to keep a distance from the painter’s gesture. In his previous series, he proceeded by retreat, by subtraction, by what he called the « non gesture », erasing part of the matter which covered his canvases and thus causing the undercoat of paint to rise to the surface.

With his recent paintings, he goes as far as abolishing any gestural implication of the artist in the production. The paintings are placed flat on shims in equilibrium. Teboul lets the paint pour onto and spread out over the canvas without intervening in its movement.

Thus, the creator’s role in the fabrication is extremely limited and the work assumes its definitive form in the very instant of its conception. The artist is, indeed, dispossessed of his actions and is kept at a distance from his realizations. In other words, the physical act of painting yields to a procedure where the color, in the purest ‘acheiropoïetic’ tradition, distributes itself onto the canvas. This Greek term means "not made by the hand of man, miraculously".

It is a miracle, because usually, any work is an artefact whose genesis can be studied through the various intermediate stages, the sketches, the preparatory drawings, from a large body of actions, stroke by stroke, which designate it as the work of a human creator.

Here however, it is only when the opaque acrylic binder used by Teboul is definitively fixed that the image appears and reveals itself, without unveiling the secrets of its production.
Monochromes ? Only in appearance, because the eye, captivated, discovers all the richness of the tones which vibrate uder its surfaces. Translucid, the paintings function like an aquatic mirror in which the spectator sees his own image.

Let us be assured, Teboul is neither a magician nor a mystic.

At the same time, for over 15 years, he has developed a photographic series in reference to painting.

He questions the « institutional » discourse which has often announced the theoretical death of painting. By photographing his worn and dried painting material, the bottoms of pots, canvases, crusts, opercula, palettes, etc... accumulated and archived, he recycles them and gives them a new life.